the california problem

March 3, 2023 7:49 AM

greetings! this is a very long post about video games and capitalism. feel free to take breaks if you need them. make sure to stick around till the end, if you can. plz enjoy. A ~20k word longform essay by Ella Guro/Liz R on game authorship (and auteurship), the commercialization of the indie game space, power structures, thoughts on what makes a game "experimental", publisher rights vs artist rights, film envy, and tracing the current game landscape back to Californian neoliberalism.
posted by curious nu (7 comments total)

Scenes, man! They are a drag.

I just played Katamari Damacy last week and totally loved it! It is rare that a game brings something new to the table. And the King is so mean! So mean. It is up there on my "favorite games" list with Inside, Limbo, Frog Fractions, Kentucky Route Zero and the only AAA game I truly love, The Last Of Us.
posted by grumpybear69 at 8:03 AM on March 3, 2023 [3 favorites]

A bit unrelated but my biggest beef with California dominance in the tech sphere is that the weather apps in things like Amazon's echo and Google's Nest displays don't display humidity or windchill adjustments on the main weather screen. In the Midwest and Northeast just straight temperature is pretty much useless.
posted by srboisvert at 8:22 AM on March 3, 2023 [3 favorites]

This is a very long post about video games and capitalism.

Thanks for the warning.
posted by Billiken at 10:46 AM on March 3, 2023 [1 favorite]

Thanks for this! I haven't finished reading it yet but it's very interesting to read in-depth analysis of the indie game scene. I'm acting as the engine programmer for my friend who's designed a game, and I'm definitely going to send him this. (We don't expect to get any commercial reward for it, for us it's just an excuse to spend time together and develop or hone various technical skills just for the sake of doing so)
posted by signsofrain at 11:39 AM on March 3, 2023

This is a very long post about video games and capitalism.

billiken: Thanks for the warning.

And class and creating art without benefactors.

I'm something like a quarter of the way in, and this felt like my own view of my role in the class and power structures in the late 1990s of the dot-com boom. Partially that's personal bullshit I carry, partially that's competition needing us to scratch and fight for any attention.

if you're a young person entering any space like this naively looking for new opportunity, and you're not an Ivy League dropout looking to be the next big entrepreneur, it was extremely hard to articulate or understand all the contradictions that existed there - or why, exactly, you couldn't fit into the space. i just knew that i didn't fit in.

I don't know what I learned, it's grift (while human enterprise is mostly lensed through the stories we tell and that is all fabrication) and people will do what they want for prestige and accomplishment and find reasons later. I'm still finding how well it fits, but the previously about "why I'm ananarchist" offers a David Graeber quote that "anarchists don't protest but act and dare the attitudes to stop them."
posted by k3ninho at 8:40 AM on March 5, 2023

It's a good source of names for indie game genres based on the developer's approach.

"Anarchic Maximalism (ⒶM)"

"One Clever Mechanic (1CM)"

"Vibes-Based (V✨B)"

"prestige-'em up"
posted by RobotHero at 10:31 AM on March 5, 2023 [1 favorite]

I also haven't read all of this but it's made me think a lot about why I've been very drawn to Rain World, which does not give a fuck about alienating or surprising its players. It also has very unique gameplay, none of which is explained, and which you mostly figure out by dying a lot in ways that often feel very unfair. I was trying to decide whether or not was gimmicky and then realized it would take paragraphs to explain, so it's probably not.

Looked at the author's twitter and she's a big fan of the game so that tracks!
posted by brook horse at 10:41 AM on March 5, 2023